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Elle Belfatto has a new responsibility this school year at North Eugene High School: working as the features editor at the school’s newspaper.

The 16-year-old junior will help other students write stories about music, fashion, business and arts in the school and community for North Eugene’s online newspaper, The Caledonian.

Belfatto is among about a dozen students enrolled in the school’s first journalism class offered to students since 2007.

Like other students in the class, which started last week, Belfatto wanted an opportunity to explore her curiosity about reporting and writing.

“I’ve always been interested in (journalism), but I never got the chance to do it until now,” she said. Belfatto hopes the class will improve her writing skills and teach her more about the community.

For the last decade, North Eugene’s newspaper waned, with several strong years in the early 2000s when students produced regular news stories — one former student from that era has gone on to work at The New York Times — but when North Eugene converted into three small schools in 2006, the journalism and yearbook programs took a hit, teacher Jesse Sherman said. Students also had run-ins with the school’s previous administration that asked to read some stories before they were published, he said.

Now that the school is one comprehensive high school again, and the new principal, Eric Anderson, made it a priority to bring journalism and yearbook back to the school, the programs are starting to pick up again.

“When (Anderson) told me he wanted me to teach yearbook again, it about floored me,” Sherman said. “And then when he told me I was going to teach a journalism class and that students would get language arts credit for it, I was just baffled.”

The school combined two classrooms earlier this school year to create a newsroom equipped with Apple computers for each student, digital cameras, audio recording devices and a free copy of the local newspaper every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Students are in class every day for 70 minutes, learning about journalistic writing, media ethics, communication history and libel, Sherman said. Students will write one news, feature, sports or opinion piece every week that will be published on the The Caledonian website, he said.

“It’s kind of a new direction,” Sherman said.

The journalism class is a part of North Eugene’s goal to offer more specialized courses for students, Anderson said. The school already has established culinary arts, woodworking and metal shop, and child development programs.

This year, the school added another program, called digital media, that teaches students about graphic design, online publishing and video and audio recording. The school receives federal grant money to pay for its vocational and technical programs, Anderson said.

Sherman, who will teach the digital media classes in addition to yearbook and journalism, is in the process of earning certification to teach those digital media classes so students can earn both high school and college credit from Lane Community College. Students will learn how to use publishing programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

Students who take those digital media classes can then take journalism and yearbook to apply their newly acquired skill set and publish their work, Sherman said. Students will design yearbook and website pages, take photos, write stories and sell advertisements for the newspaper’s website and the yearbook, he said.

Journalism had been an after-school club at North for the last six years, said Sherman, who served as the newspaper adviser then. That made it more difficult for students to write stories regularly because they weren’t getting any class credit for it and didn’t have dedicated time to work on stories during the school day, he said.

Students also were leery of publishing stories that questioned administrative or district policies because the school’s previous administration sometimes asked to preview stories before they were published.

The district also wanted the newspaper’s website to be a part of the district’s own website domain, Sherman said. The students, however, continued publishing The Caledonian on a WordPress account that is independent of the district.

Sherman said he’ll teach students how high school journalists are protected under Oregon’s free expression law, which provides strong free speech protection to student journalists and protects them from administrative censorship.

Students are already delving into an array of story topics, Sherman said. One student is working on an article about how legalizing marijuana would work in Oregon, while another student is writing about what students feel is a pesky 10-minute break in-between some classes during the school day because of the district’s new high school common schedule.

Students have also written about the school’s basketball teams and a simulated drunk driving crash to encourage teens not to drink and drive.

With the newspaper’s website page views at an all-time high and with support from the principal, Sherman hopes the program is on the mend.

“It seems wrong not to have a student newspaper,” he said. “You can’t have a democracy that functions properly without having a student newspaper.”

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